This week’s poem, Kenneth Rosen’s “Three Robins,” finds in these birds an unexpected memento mori – a reminder of mortality. I love this poem’s observations and ponderings, alternately erudite, whimsical and fraught, and how the speaker’s thoughts surge into the mythic, the oracular, as the robins take flight into the setting sun.
Rosen’s most recent book, “Gomorrah,” is a long, six-part poem augmented by reproductions of about 50 paintings by the Portland artist Richard Wilson and published in 2017 by Fomite, a small press in Burlington, Vermont. The poem was written and its accompanying paintings assembled by Rosen 25 years earlier, when Xerox color copying first became available. More recently, his poems have appeared in The Hole in the Head Review, an online quarterly edited by William Schulz in Windham.
Three Robins
By Kenneth Rosen
I saw three robins squatting in my late
Neighbor’s next-door thicket,
Noble, mute, immobile messengers
Of mutual mortal solemnity,
Glaring with secret, frigid, undeclared
Umbrage. Turdus migratorius,
Two degrees below zero, thicket neglected
All summer, massive Japanese
Grape arbor collapsing last fall, our back
Yards bare all winter. Turdus
Means thrush, migratorius we already
Know. Why out my side window?
Why me? Why not finches and sparrows
Flitting to and fro, pecking the birdbath’s
Saucers of ice. Timor mortis conturbat me.
This much too we must know. Then
For no reason I could see, the three arose,
Flexed flight’s pinions and became
Dark diminishing cracks in their shared air’s
Accomplished glow, soared and swerved
Toward the setting sun—death’s red bosom,
The setting sun, they who’d departed
One by one, as shall we all, and I was now
Alone and left to tell thee, make
Sense of their feathered semaphores’ coarse,
Abrupt, obvious prophecies.
What else can I tell you? What can I say?
Ominous robins, yes. They flew away.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Three Robins,” copyright 2024 by Kenneth Rosen, appears by permission of the author.
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